A key question is looming for Vice President Kamala Harris as she edges closer to gaining the Democratic presidential nomination: Can she turn the Biden-Harris economic record into a political advantage in a way that President Joe Biden failed to do?

In some ways, her task would seem straightforward: The administration oversaw a vigorous rebound from the pandemic recession, one that shrank the U.S. unemployment rate to a half-century low of 3.4% in early 2023 — far below the painful 6.4% rate when Biden and Harris took office in 2021. The rate stayed below 4% for more than two years, the longest such stretch since the 1960s.